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Is username squatting the next online brand nightmare?

Everybody knows about cybersquatters; those dreaded ‘entrepreneurs‘ who register domain names related to brand names and trademarks that they have no rights to.

ICANN, the organization that oversees the domain name system, provides a dispute mechanism by which trademark owners can dispute a domain name registration and win back domains that infringe upon their rights.

That mechanism makes it relatively easy and cost-effective for trademark owners to get back domains that they have a legitimate claim to.

But as Hunter Walk discusses on his blog, there may be an even uglier problem emerging: username squatting.

On Twitter, for instance, many usernames that are related to major brands and companies are not owned by those brands and companies; they’ve been registered by other parties unknown for purposes unknown.

For obvious reasons this can be problematic. Brands can find that they’ve been brandjacked and they can find that their trademarks are being taken on these services to benefit their registrants (e.g. for SEO purposes).

Unlike with domain names, there’s often little brands can do. They can complain to the owner of the service and demand that usernames infringing upon their trademarks be turned over but if the owner of the service doesn’t take action for whatever reason, the only recourse may be costly litigation.

Making matters worse: since it usually doesn’t cost anything to register a username on a
popular service, there’s no barrier to entry for username squatters,
meaning that brands are increasingly going to find that there’s always
somebody willing to register a brand as a username.

When you consider just how many popular services there are and how many of those services provide vanity URLs based on usernames, you can see the scope of the challenge brands face. It’s a real task to keep track of username squatting and even more of a task to register usernames on all of the services out there before the squatters get to them.

Nonetheless, this is something brands do need to deal with, especially on services where brandjacking is a real threat, such as Twitter.

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Lot of talk this week about who owns the digital marketing customer. Brands and ad agencies claim they own the customer’s data. More than a few panelists at Thursday’s Digiday sessions said that if the customer is paying a network or site for interaction privileges at that moment, then that site owns the customer. To all those who say they can own the customer, here’s a newsflash: no one owns the customer.

Nor does anyone rent the customer or loan a customer. Any company that thinks they can own the customer, or the customer’s data, or the customer’s digital experience, has a weird type of business neuroticism. That neurosis might be best cured through a little reality therapy. The reality is, customers may pay you time, attention, and revenue, but they give you no more than that. The goal of internet marketing is to create the opportunities for that attention and revenue.

Erick Schonfeld of Techcrunch yesterday reckoned that IE8 fares poorly in the browser speed stakes, and contests that it is key for Microsoft to retain market share.

He wrote: “Speed is really everything. Without speed, all the other features fall by the wayside. We’ll have to wait for new independent speed tests to see how IE8 stacks up, but speed does not appear to be its strong point.”

Nice observation, but I’m not so sure that browser speed matters for the majority of web users. Techies and internet fiends will spot the difference, for sure, but how many tech-savvy people do you know that still use IE?

We live in a maelstrom of activity and invention. A new world we are evolving every day; some days more than others. We sometimes, perhaps more often than we’d like to think, get caught up in the hype or in the detail of what we do. We get stuck on definitions and fads, guidelines and best practice, manifestos and policies.

We also forget about the simple beauty of the medium we work in. This is a personal reflection, indulgent perhaps. But I make no concessions: it sometimes good to take a step backwards and reflect on what we’ve got now and what’s in front of us.

We’re in the land of startups this week, spending a day in the life of Ann-Marie Rossiter, Head of Marketing at events marketplace HeadBox. As usual, we’ll be finding out what it takes to succeed in this role, from skills and tools to the daily routine. If you’d like to appear in this feature, get […]